Monthly Archives: December 2014

What does it mean to be a critical thinker in the digital age? In a few short paragraphs, Pearl Zhu draws together the fundamental tenants of the hybrid, agile mind. The blurring of boundaries between workplace and domestic, the virtual and the physical, demand a greater appreciation of the strategic and the reflexive in IT, as in life. Beyond Logic When someone uses the word agile to describe their project methodology, there should be a …

What happens when you attempt to execute agile methods without an agile sensibility? You fail, or at best, you stumble your way into breaking even. Victor Szalvay identifies five of the worst ways that organizations hurt themselves by neglecting agile values in an article at Agile Connection: Modifying stock agile frameworks before the organization has thoroughly absorbed an agile philosophy Scaling up before there is success Reliance on cliché agile practices for success Failure to …

Prepare yourself for a heap of agile tips so big that it just might crush you if it falls over. Agile practitioner David Jensen relates several tips from a year of successful agile project and development collaboration. Hit the Ground Running Jensen recommends hitting the ground running with a finite set of definitive high-level goals. Detail can wait. Let the prototyping start immediately and use the prototypes if possible. In other words, “learn by doing.” …

The creation of a buzzword is never intended by its originators. But oftentimes, in spite of best efforts, it becomes a buzzword nonetheless. That is what Johanna Rothman, writing for PM Hut, fears has happened to the word “agile.” In the beginning, agile was something you achieved, a productivity enhancement won through the nuanced application of an emerging methodology. Now, more often than not, Agile is just a label that IT operations award themselves for …

Are you new to the scrum universe? Do you want to learn the ropes, but there are just so many ropes to get tangled up in? Matthew Heusser writes for CIO.com with a slideshow of starter information to get you prepped and untangled. Traveling the Stars with Scrum Scrum adds specific additional practices on top of programming and testing and is probably the most popular form of agile. It can be considered an “all-at-once model.” …

On the surface, agile and ITIL sound like two different worlds. But as Professor P. Ross S. Wise explains, they can actually complement each other rather nicely under the right circumstances. Let’s see how agile can breathe new life into our old friend ITIL. A Faster Framework Agile is an iterative methodology for delivering projects, especially adept at changing course as the tides shift. ITIL is a best practices framework for IT service management, providing …

It can be a real challenge to give software the amount of testing it really deserves. Testing efforts often begin too late to be totally effective, and Mike Cohn believes one reason why testing falls short is because it is being automated at the wrong level. In the test automation pyramid, there is unit testing at the bottom, user interface (UI) testing at the top, and service-level testing in the middle. Cohn believes that middle …

Being agile means truly committing to all of its principles, down to the letter. Jeff Sutherland believes that the single most important aspect of running good Scrum is “getting to done.” That may sound intuitive, except that a reported 49 percent of agile projects fail. That means nearly half of the agile being used is being used wrong, and a big part of it is that teams are not getting to done. The Roadmap Having …

Standardizing agile so that it can be understood and tracked by the business can easily turn into a process of defanging everything that makes agile worthwhile. Chris Moody writes with seven ways to measure success in an agile organization without in